Better use of fuel, lower costs with maintenance and claims and more safety for drivers: these are some of the dreams of the light fleet manager.
Achieving all this seems to be a great challenge, but there is a formula: to succeed in managing small fleets, it is essential to carry out an efficient planning.
We know that light fleet planning can be laborious, mainly because the manager is usually busy with so many management and supervision tasks.
However, the extra cost of wasted fuel, if multiplied by the number of vehicles in its fleet, impacts the business cash. This extends to other expenses caused by lack of planning.
Thinking of helping you organize your light fleet management for save costs and preserve driver safety, we prepared this text with 7 simplified tips for planning the management of small fleets. Enjoy reading!
Plan vehicle acquisition for light fleets
Define clear processes and policies for managing small fleets
Include preventive vehicle maintenance in your planning
Consider the experience of fleet drivers
Manage fuel usage
Automate light fleet management tasks with technology
Define your strategy in managing small fleets
Plan vehicle acquisition for light fleets
The goal of the vast majority of fleet managers is find effective ways to control costs and increase profitability.
With that in mind, in the annual planning, if there is a need to change vehicles, it is essential to consider the acquisition of options with low fuel consumption, lower maintenance costs and greater driver safety.
With so many options on the market, you can choose cars with excellent value for money. Evaluate the following indicators:
- Autonomy of each vehicle option;
- Average cost per liter of each type of fuel;
- Cost of each vehicle option;
- Value of recommended revisions;
- Vehicle resistance;
- Safety offered to the driver.
With this assessment, in addition to finding the best vehicle model for your fleet, you can also plan annual costs based on this goal.
Read more: Cost management: does your fleet need to reduce consumption?
Define clear processes and policies for managing small fleets
An important step in planning is clear fleet policies on all processes to avoid confusion. All drivers and other employees must have procedural guidelines that everyone must follow regarding:
- Fines policy;
- Adequate fuel consumption;
- Car maintenance;
- Responsibilities of each area of the company involved with the fleet;
- Rules for the good use of the fleet;
- Vehicle checklist;
- Terms of responsibility.
Thus, it will be much easier to organize your fleet management. In addition, another great advantage is that maintaining this dialogue with drivers allows you to monitor their work more closely, so that they can, together, establish ways to improve productivity and also the quality of services.
Um fleet management system with fleet policy functionality allows you to determine the rules of your operation and what are infractions in it, configure as many policies as necessary, choose the business hours of each policy, establish distances as well as the maximum time stopped with the ignition on and much more.
Read more: Trends for fleet management in 2022
With this well-established fleet policy, plan meetings throughout the year to exchange information and ensure that everything is aligned and to listen to drivers' opinions and suggestions.
Include preventive vehicle maintenance in your planning
When it comes to best practices in fleet management, it is a fact that valuing safety is essential. Therefore, carry out the planning of all the preventive maintenance of the year, so that the checks are always up to date. For this, an important step is to have a list of everything that needs to be checked periodically, such as:
- Belts and hoses;
- leaks;
- axes;
- External and internal lights;
- Tires, wheels and rims;
- Fuel, auxiliary, braking, exhaust systems, etc.;
- Fluids;
- Among others.
With that list in hand, don't wait for the vehicle to break down to take it to the mechanic. In addition to being more expensive and impairing the productivity of the business with cars stopped, it also puts the driver's life at risk, who may suffer an accident due to lack of proper maintenance.
Read more: Car review: why is it so important in small fleet management?
Consider the experience of fleet drivers
Have you ever stopped to think that no one knows the vehicles in your fleet as well as the drivers who depend on them every day?
With that in mind, it is impossible to leave aside the experience of each one of them when planning. You drivers need to be allies in fleet management.
So plan meetings frequently to talk about checking and running the cars. Take advantage of this space to ask the opinion of drivers about the vehicles being used. Keeping open for dialogue will improve your management, as it helps you gather information and improve your next plans.
Manage fuel usage
Fuel is one of the fleet's main operating costs. Therefore, one successful fleet manager knows when, where and with what quantity its vehicles are being refueled and, thus, manages to control fuel costs much more efficiently.
It is therefore essential, when planning the year of the fleet:
- Establish partnerships with trusted gas stations;
- Carry out maintenance that avoids wasting fuel;
- Plan economical routes, considering distance, traffic and route conditions;
- Use fuel card to improve the control of supplies;
- Investing in a fuel management system, which provides information on the precise cost per kilometer driven, the average consumption of vehicles, the price per liter and suspicious fueling.
Automate light fleet management tasks with technology
In your planning, consider that managing a fleet requires data. Budget reports, mileage indicators, consumption reports, fleet policies and much more.
With technology, piles of paper that were previously necessary to store information about fleets can now be transformed into digital files, which can be easily saved and managed, optimizing the organization of the company and also the time of the fleet manager.
Read more: What is the ideal technology for my fleet?
In addition to these, there are several other advantages in allying with technology:
- Know the exact location of the fleet: a fleet management system is able to locate the vehicle during its route.
In this sense, it is possible to know if the drivers are taking the planned route or if there are detours that were not in the planning. With this possibility, you offer more safety for your driver, since if something unexpected happens, it's easy to locate.
- Custom report generation: it is possible to create reports with information about everything that happens in the fleet, routes traveled, number of stops, alerts generated and much more.
- Better resource management: with all the data on driver and fleet performance, you can include in your planning the resources to be used to optimize processes and further improve the quality of services.
- Control of the entire fleet: neither you nor your driver need to waste a lot of time on calls to exchange information about the progress of the planning, since everything is automated.
This way, your driver runs less risk of using cell phone in traffic, suffering an accident that puts his life at risk and even having high cost of infringement.
Hence, plan to insert an integrated system during your planning. In addition to all these benefits, you can be sure that your next planning will have a positive impact and will be much simpler, as you will already have detailed reports for the entire year, which will help you make decisions.
Read more: Technology in favor of fleet management
Define your strategy in managing small fleets
How was the performance of your fleet this past year?
What was positive and negative? What exceeded expectations?
These and other questions are important when defining fleet strategies for next year. You need to have your new goals very clear, so you don't run the risk of managing a business with uncertain goals. Some of the goals may be to reduce:
- Number of fines;
- Maintenance expenses;
- Tire expenses;
- Fuel consumption.
In addition, another fleet manager's goal may be to improve the work for drivers, offer more safety and automate activities so that they can drive with more calm and focus.
Regardless of the company's priority for the coming year, it is essential to establish these goals and make them very clear to all employees, so that everyone is heading in the same direction. For this, take into account that:
- The objective must be clear and specific, easily understood by everyone on the team;
- The goal should be challenging yet realistic, achievable by the team, because setting something impossible will lead to frustration for everyone;
- The goal must be measurable. That is, in reais, liters, pieces, numbers and the like;
- The goal must have a deadline, a deadline.
As you already know, technology offers a lot of information about your own business. With these reports, it will be much easier to set the goal, measure the results and monitor the performance of everyone involved.
Do you want to continue learning about ways to leverage results in light fleet management with technology? Access the free eBook we prepared for you and learn more about telemetry:
